mdrip

mdrip is a tool for markdown-based literate programming.

• It allows one to place your fenced code blocks under test.

• It serves a keyboard-driven app with the rendered markdown to a browser, allowing one to navigate through the blocks and send them directly to tmux for execution.

See installation options.

Use it for Testing

Use mdrip to assure that your markdown-based instructions actually work.

To quickly demo this, use the following commands to download a busted Go tutorial:

repo=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/monopole/mdrip
curl -O $repo/master/assets/bustedGoTutorial.md

This markdown has code blocks showing how to write, compile and run a Go program in your TMPDIR.

Install mdrip, then extract blocks to stdout:

mdrip print bustedGoTutorial.md

Some code blocks in this markdown have labels; these are visible as HTML comments preceding the blocks in the raw markdown.

Use a label to extract a subset of blocks:

mdrip print --label goCommand bustedGoTutorial.md

Pipe the output of the above into /bin/bash -e to have the effect of a test, or for cleaner output try the test command:

mdrip test bustedGoTutorial.md
echo $?

The above command should show an error, and exit with non-zero status, because the tutorial has errors.

Fix the error:

cp bustedGoTutorial.md goTutorial.md

sed -i 's|badecho |echo |' goTutorial.md

Try the fix:

mdrip test goTutorial.md
echo $?

There's another error. Fix it:

sed -i 's|comment this|// comment this|' goTutorial.md

There are now two changes:

diff bustedGoTutorial.md goTutorial.md || echo files differ

Test the new file:

mdrip test goTutorial.md
echo $?

The return code should be zero.

You can run a block in your current shell to, say, set current environment variables as specified in the markdown:

eval "$(mdrip print --label setEnv goTutorial.md)"
echo $greeting

The upshot is that adding a line like

mdrip test --label {someLabel} {path}

to your CI/CD test framework covers the markdown code block execution path determined by that label.

The {path} argument defaults to your current directory (.), but it can be

• a path to a file,
• a path to a directory,
• a GitHub URL in the style gh:{user}/{repoName},
• or a particular file or a directory in the repo, e.g. gh:{user}/{repoName}/foo/bar.

Labels

Add labels to a code block by preceding the block with a one-line HTML comment, e.g:

<!-- @sayHello @mississippi @tutorial01 -->
```
echo hello
```

Labels are just words beginning with @ in the comment.

The first label on a block is slightly special in that it is treated as the block's name for reporting. If no labels are present, a block name is generated.

A @skip label tells mdrip to ignore the block for testing.

Use it for Tutorials

mdrip works with tmux to help develop and run command line procedures.

Generate some markdown content with:

tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
mdrip generatetestdata ${tmpdir}/mdTestData

then enter tmux, and start a server:

tmux
mdrip serve ${tmpdir}/mdTestData &

Visit localhost.

• j and k move among blocks

• Enter sends the current block to tmux

• ? shows all key controls

Literate Programming

mdrip encourages literate programming via markdown. It lets one run code that is embedded in explanatory content.

One can use here documents to incorporate any programming language into tested markdown - as in the busted Go tutorial discussed above. That tutorial could have covered C, C++, Rust, etc.

Place commands that the reader would want to execute directly (with no edits) in fenced code blocks.

In contrast, code-style text that is not intended for copy/paste execution, e.g. alternative commands with fake arguments or example output, should be in a fenced code block indented via a block quote. Block quotes are ignored by mdrip.